The political temperature between Japan and China is rising again over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Once more oil appears to be a principal issue – as it was in the period leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The road to Pearl Harbor and to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki needs to be clearly illuminated now more than ever because the question of whether Japan should consider developing its own nuclear weapons is moving into the mainstream political discourse in Japan. (See: Nationalists take power in Japan and fire warning shot to China)
More than 67 years after those bombings, few know that Japanese forces were first targeted on May 5, 1943 as the preferred target for those atom bombs, long before the bombs were built and well before anyone knew when the war would be over. In fact, Germany was explicitly de-targeted on that same date by the Military Policy Committee.  The first targeting was not about saving American lives or even ending the war early.  And the entire context of the events in the Pacific area from well before Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima was about which power -- Japan or the United States -- would dominate the Pacific Area.  In this August 2012 talk commemorating the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research provides that context and some little known critical facts about the dawn of the nuclear age. Visit www.ieer.org
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